It's been a while since I blogged here! Herewith, an oldie-but-goodie from the October/November 2010 issue of FREE INQUIRY. At the time I was kicking off an event inviting readers to describe secular humanism is one word. I picked the word "emancipatory." Subject only to a 1000-word limit, here's what I wrote.

As
some readers know, I’m a longtime advocate of humanists, atheists, and other
secular folks conspicuously sitting
out that Christian observance of Jesus’s birthday that monopolizes the last six
weeks of every year. I’m hardly the only one, but clearly “going Yule-free” is a
minority stance among nonreligious Americans. From time to time, seculars who
enjoy the holiday in whatever form – and who may resent my suggestions that by
doing so, they might be harming our community – pose a question along the lines
of, “But I like exchanging gifts with my loved ones. I like the decorations and
the songs. Hell, I like eggnog. What evidence do you have that nonreligious
people celebrating the holiday in some form is harmful?”

First, I join in the general jubilation that same-sex marriage is now legal in all 50 states. It's a great step forward for same-sex couples who want to marry. But not all do. Come to think of it, not all opposite-sex couples want to marry. Civil-rights landmark that it undeniably is, the same-sex marriage victory has left some of us behind.

Molly Worthen's Sunday New York Times op-ed on the Sunday Assembly phenomenon ("Wanted: A Theology of Atheism," May 30) demonstrates, if nothing else, how badly we need to educate the media about the humanist movement -- and about atheism, for that matter.

First Indiana, now Arkansas have passed "religious freedom" bills that will protect Christians who discriminate on religious grounds. This is a predictable result of the 1993 federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), a regrettable law whose beneficiaries are now (in the wake of the disastrous Hobby Lobby decision) free to unleash all the unconstitutional mischief that this ill-considered legislation always portended.

What's the top church-state un-story of 2014? I'd have to nominate the close cooperation between the United States and the Holy See in the diplomatic negotiations that led to the change of U. S. policy toward Cuba. The pope is the head of a church; he is a head of state only by dint of a huge and archaic legal fiction. For the White House to work that closely with a single church on a geopolitical issue violates the separation of church and state in the most literal way imaginable, and I'm amazed that none of the usual church-state watchdogs raised an objection to it.

In a post from yesterday, my esteemed colleague David Koepsell, one of my predecessors as executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism, suggests that he is doing more than I am to give Kirk Cameron nightmares. David good-naturedly suggests that by keeping a more-or-less traditional Christmas with zero religious or supernatural content, he and his thoroughly secular family are doing more to undermine Christianity’s role in the culture than I am when I urge atheists, humanists, and freethinkers to spurn the Christians’ birthday festival altogether. I respectfully disagree. Equally respectfully, I hope, I would warn David that his chosen path carries a very real risk of being co-opted, and of inadvertently helping Christianity to achieve the best future it can hope for in a world that’s secularizing out from under it.

In today’s New York Times, David Brooks offers his obligatory annual column of holiday woo. In “The Subtle Sensations of Faith” he plumps for faith as a near-universal human experience. He depicts it as the response to genuine “glimmering experiences … of wonder and mystery,” “magical moments of wonder and clearest consciousness, which suggested a dimension of existence beyond the everyday.” Clearly, Brooks accepts without question that these are experiences of something genuine – that is to say, that there factually is “a dimension of existence beyond the everyday.” Sorry, Mr. Brooks, I don’t buy it.

In my Dec/Jan Free Inquiry op-ed "Thirty Years Yule-Free" I mentioned my 1992 Secular Humanist Bulletin article, "Confessions of an Anti-Claus," the inadvertent beginning of my personal war on Christmas. Apparently there are some readers out there who haven't saved their Bulletins from 1992, who want to see that article -- but it's not archived anywhere online. Okay, if you're terminally curious, here is a PDF scan of the article that started it all.